dark black makeup

...we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic. 

You get home in time for dinner. “Did anything interesting happen at work today?” your partner asks. They frown at the strange red marks circling your throat. “No,” you say. “No.”

Down the hallway, someone is screaming. When you go to look, nobody is there. You turn up the volume on the TV – the Capitols are playing and they’re running up the score. Ovechkin is on the power play. It’s best that you don’t look again.

Once you saw a ghost. It stole your sandwich wrapper, but left the sandwich.

When spring comes, the ice thaws. Everybody complains of allergies. This is why you are weeping. Your eyes are red-rimmed for weeks and weeks and weeks.

You have heard that somewhere, Captain America is very sad.

On a Thursday morning in late December, you meet the Secretary. “The Secretary,” people whisper. “The Secretary is here. The Secretary is here for the party.” There is always a party. The party does not end. The party is always happening. For as long as you’ve been here the party has always been happening, and it will continue to happen long after you leave. You look into the Secretary’s eyes when he shakes your hand and there is nothing there.

Nobody will talk about Prague.

You smell Axe body spray and a cloud passes over the sun. The birds sing louder, as if their noise will prevent what is coming. You know it will not. Nothing can prevent this. It is inevitable.

The new STRIKE team is here. They have no faces. Their eyes are silver mirrors, reflecting your dessicated heart. “Please,” you whisper, though you do not know why. They ignore you. It is the hunter’s moon, and they have business elsewhere tonight.

Strange things happen, under the river. It is known. It is known. The waters of the Potomoc hide many things.

You no longer remember a time when you thought about resisting.

“What does the ghost want,” a brave man says. It is a stone dropping into a pond. The ripples of the words spread outwards, like waves of glittering black beetles flying into your mouth, into your eyes, crawling down into your ears. What does the ghost want. What does the ghost want. What does the ghost want. The words fill your throat and you cannot scream.

At dusk, the winged man stands at the edge of the forest. He does not know the depths of human frailty. You edge back into the shadows and pray he is not watching.

On a sunny day, you toss your apple core into the river. The water roils, bubbling and churning as if some great beast writhed and thrashed in the depths. You swear you will bring it meat tomorrow. Only the tourists swim here. 

“Rechargeable batteries don’t last long enough,” the new Commander says thoughtfully. Filing his requisition forms fills you with dread.

Your neighbour stops by your cubicle. She has been called to the Hill, and she wants you to water her plant while she is away. You have never been called to the Hill. You have never been called to the Hill, and you hope you never will. “Until I return,” she says, faltering. Nobody has ever returned from the Hill.

A man with one eye sweeps through the room. He sees you. He sees all of you. The Secretary is wise to keep him at bay.

Once, a man claimed he had made something wonderful. He is dead now.

Outside, a man falls past your window. He never lands. Perhaps he is still falling, even now.

The red-haired woman wears a different face than she did this morning. Every day, she wakes up and puts on a different face. You are careful to appease her, or perhaps she will take your face from you next. You have seen what she leaves behind. If she was more merciful, she would let them die, but she is utterly without mercy.

You must report to the Council. Nobody can tell you who or where they are, only that you must report. Your bones throb and ache with the knowledge. It gnaws at your skull, drives you onwards. The Council must speak with you. You keep searching for them, leaving bloody footprints down the hallway. You must report to the Council.

On 22nd Street, there is a bank.

There is a man with wings. He grieves for what he has lost. His body throws strange shadows, as if another man flew beside him. You see it in the corner of your eye as he circles above you, but when you turn your head there is nothing.

Every third Sunday, the river turns red with blood. Nobody speaks of it. It is unwise to draw the notice of the Old Ones.

So I wasn’t sure whether to make this post or not. I didn’t want it to seem like I was attacking anybody in anyway but it just doesn’t sit well with me to see someone who is using somebody else’s work for profit, even if it is the shittiest fanfic of all time (I mean that in the most loving way). The point of this post is to discuss why Rose Christo, the woman claiming to be Tara Gilesbie, is lying to you and what I believe her reasons may be. I’d like to say I dont mean to attack Rose, and I do understand why she would do this, but that doesn’t make it okay. There is a lot but its worth the read. Im also making this on a throwaway blog in case this causes drama, I dont want to ruin my personal with it.

First lets get into the evidence against her being Tara:

1) Why I was suspicious

I thought its probably best to start with why I decided to look into this. The first thing is, as we all probably know, there have been so many people claiming to be the true author or a relative or friend of hers. This meant when I saw her claim I was suspicious because if you believe everyone then theres about 50 Tara Gilesbies.

2) The fictionpress account

We first heard about the fictionpress account a few weeks ago. Nobody had heard of it and the only thing that made it look genuine was the date it was made. But it could easily have just been an old account that didn’t end up ever being used (like, for example, this blog) that has been re-purposed to make it look genuine. There wasnt really much information about the identity of the updater except she wasnt Lani Sarem, a hint that she works in the book industry, and a very out of place reference to Undyne. As in there is no reason for her to have added that. Except that it brings us on to her tumblr.

3) Her tumblr

In the post that was made revealing her identity (I don’t know the date it was made as the post has been deleted) it was mentioned that a key element to figuring out her identity was the fact that “she posts about undyne constantly”. Think about that a second. A key factor in finding this woman’s tumblr involved an out of place sentence that had absolutely no reason to be there. No reason that is, except to give some connection between the fictionpress and the tumblr. I mean why did she even add it? If I’m trying to hide my identity online then I don’t mention anything about myself unless its relevant and even then I avoid it. I’ll talk more about this later but if she had to keep her identity secret why did she mention this?

Still on her tumblr, there is a post where Rose says she is Tara:

As yo can see, in the tags she is essentially saying that she is Tara. The thing is though, this post was made on the 7th March. Way before any of this. Again we’ll get more into this later but if she has been told by her publisher not to reveal her identity why is she openly admitting it and why is she now complaining of being “outed against her will”?

Here she is saying she was outed against her will and that she could be axed for talking about it when she admitted it on her blog months ago.

4) Her twitter

This one is the most bizarre and suspicious pieces of evidence in my opinion. I’m just gonna post it and ask you a few questions.

This is something that was used as evidence in the post revealing her so was obviously tweeted before then. Why, when she cannot reveal her identity for fear of being axed, is she tweeting a photo that clearly identifies her as the owner of the fictionpress account? Why doesn’t she save it in her tumblr drafts where nobody can see it? Why does she need to save a screenshot in case of hardware failure? Can she not just take another screenshot? Why does she even need to save this particular screenshot? Why is this the only image she needs to save?

Nothing about this tweet makes sense. Its like shes both drawing attention to it and telling you to ignore it. It makes no sense for her to tweet this unless she wants to be found. Which brings us on to the next point.

5) Why did she let herself be found

I say let herself be found because lets face it, thats what she did. Despite saying several times she didnt want to be found or that she couldnt reveal it because her publisher wouldnt let her:

she left multiple clues and some obvious things that led directly to her. She even said above that she was “trying not to say anything about it” when she posted about it in march, tweeted that screenshot, and updated the fictionpress. She pretty clearly wanted to be found and did nothing to deny it. Which she could have done. I’ve been accused of being Tara multiple times myself (dont ask it was weird) and all you need to do is laugh it off and say no and people will leave you lone. If it wasn’t for the breadcrumbs Rose purposefully left there would barely be a case and she could easily deny it. So the question is, why, when her job is supposedly at risk if this got out, did she leave massive clues and admit it immediately?

6) Her age

Now the age of the real Tara is unknown, but whether you believe it was trollfic or not it was written by someone very young. 14 at most.

In this post, Rose reveals her age to be 27:

If she is 27 now then at the time My Immortal was written she would be 16-17. Now already its suspicious because thats way too old to be writing like that if its serious and 16-17 year olds tend to have way better things to do than write a shitty fanfic. I mean even I, the most unpopular person in my school with zero friends and no social life, had better things to do than write a shitty harry potter self insert fanfic. But it gets more suspicious than that. In this post she says that she wrote it at 15

The thing is, the youngest she could have been was 16. She can supposedly remember the exact date she made her fictionpress account despite it being listed wrong (see her fictionpress account) but she can’t remember her age when she wrote a fanfiction that was so important to her shes currently writing memoirs about it (more on those later). So not only is she too old to have written my immortal, she doesn’t even know how old she was when it was written.

7) Raven

Rose has mentioned Raven a couple of times in passing. Now I’d understand that Raven may not want to be involved in this. Thats not what this point is about. This point is about how she went from briefly mentioning Raven in passing to this:

Who describes a friend like this? Id expect this about a fictional character but not a friend. If i was to write about my crush when I was 16 it would go more like “she was really pretty and really nice and I loved to be around her” not a six sentence paragraph that reads like shes a character in my novel. And before you say “oh shes a writer” so am I. I mean not professionally or anything but I’ve written some short horror stories that people really liked and im working on writing a book. I’ve never seen a writer write this kind of way about a real person they know. Maybe this isnt a definitive piece of evidence on its own but in conjunction with everything else it is very suspicious.

8) Her memoirs

This isnt all im gonna say about her memoirs. Theres gonna be a bit more later on (not much later im nearly there) but theres a few things that don’t add up. first of all the title.

Anybody else think that the title was meant to be Under the Same Stars: The Search for My Brother and then the My Immortal bit was just tacked on to the end? And especially with what shes said about her life on her blog. I’m not gonna repeat it but from what I’ve read the shorter title would be about something fairly serious especially when compared to a shitty Harry Potter fanfic so why are they both included in the title, except to draw attention to the fact that My Immortal is in this book.

9) A few little things that dont add up

Last bit before I go into the reasons why I think Rose lied about this. It’s just some things that dont make sense especially combined with other evidence.

Firstly theres this:

Sure. The author of My Immortal, a fanfiction that contains a self insert character called Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way, who is not related to Gerard way but wishes she was because hes “a major fuckin hottie”, who is also a vampire, who goes to a my chemical romance concert, has never been a fan of my chemical romance? I mean was this whole story actually written by just Raven because if you were not the level of “starry eyed loser” to ever consider yourself a fan I sincerely doubt you would write this fanfiction. Don’t get me wrong, I have been the starry eyed loser who listened to music because a pretty girl recommended it to me and I’m a gay mess, but I still consider myself as having been a fan of those in the past because whatever the reason, at the time I liked them. Basically if Tara Gilesbie was never a fan of MCR, I’m a fucking goat.

If the publishers didn’t want anybody to know, why did they tweet this? All that needs to be said about this tweet.

Why?

So, why did she fake it? This is quite simple actually, publicity. Specifically, publicity for her memoirs. Theres a lot of stuff she seems to want to speak out on and writing about her experiences with them is a great way to do that. Theres a problem though. It’s very hard for memoirs to be successful. I mean, how many memoirs have you read or would want to? Even out of people I’m really interested in I’ve never really wanted to read their memoirs. And Rose isn’t that well known. She has these stories she wants to tell but it would be very hard to get people to listen unless there was something in that book they really wanted to know. And as I said in the beginning I understand wanting that. But that doesnt mean its okay to use somebody elses work to draw people in. I mean look at how many times, when answering questions about My Immortal (that nobody is making her answer and is supposedly in her best interests to ignore) does she tell people to check out her memoirs or wait until her memoirs to find out the answer to their question. And its working. I’ve seen so many people saying they were gonna buy her memoirs or are gonna buy her books. Because everyone wants the answer to this mystery.

It seems very clear to me, and many other people, that this was a scheme created by Rose and her publishers to gain interest in her memoirs and other books. And its not right. Because somewhere out there is the real Tara and shes not getting any of the money from this scheme and also theres the person who made the post revealing Rose’s “identity”, who is being painted as a stalker when she did exactly what they wanted her to do. She’s since deleted the post and I hope so much that nobody is attacking her over this but it is tumblr so I feel there might be.

To Rose, I’m not trying to attack you, I understand the frustration of not being successful at your passion, I just think that what you’re doing is wrong.

Starring: Morgan Plus 8